What To Do If Your Search Rankings Disappear

There can be numerous reasons why the search rankings of your website might get get eliminated. The reasons for such disappearances are not as important as to whether whether you’re prepared for the day when this happens.

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Below are a few points that will help you handle such situations:

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1. Link quality control

Whether you are building links on your own, or, outsourcing them, it’s necessary to audit your link profile. Review them and decide what you would like to remove. For this, you can open up Webmaster Tools and view the sites that have the most links. If you find any site-wide links, replace them with single links, if possible.

Check if any particular anchor text has been used more than 20 per cent of your inbound links. In that case, you might be at risk and need to change the anchor text.

In the third scenario, if you are buying links or building private link networks, you should stop it completely. All these links are supposed to get eliminated at some point. In any case, if these links are discounted by Google, you will lose all future value. Besides, when you buy more links, it gets riskier.

2. Website Design

If you read the Google guidelines, you’ll learn that it states specifically that while creating a page, you should aim for users, rather than search engines. You can’t guarantee ranking by following this guideline, but violating it might get you penalized.

Website design is an important factor, especially when it comes to doubling traffic by doubling conversion rates of sites. Many sites do this. When you create good design, it earns natural links.

Below are some specific tips to leverage user experience:

Use a responsive design

Learn to set up split tests along with other statistical testing techniques.

Conduct user tests and find out the way your target audience interacts with the site

Try to find out consumer psychology and use it while creating design of the site

3. Modern on-site SEO

On-site SEO is not just limited to keyword placement. Pages that don’t serve their purpose are at risk of Panda penalization and similar algorithmic demotions. Pages made for AdSense, or, pages that use ads, are also highly at risk. Pages with repetitive keyword use also face similar risks.

4. Aim for zero site errors

Errors can really harm a site that is otherwise of high quality. Check for errors in Google Webmaster Tools, and eliminate the ones that are visible. Later, you can use tools like Moz.

Some common SEO errors that can be avoided include 404 pages, redirects except for 301, no product descriptions, long title tags, missing meta descriptions, poor internal linking, no robots.txt, and no sitemap.

5. Refine content

Consider your existing pages and see the number of pages that are contributing significant traffic. If any content is not meeting the standards, you should eliminate or fix it.

6. Build quality links

Unless it is from one of the top sites in your industry, don’t just keep building links. You should start building links that meet quality criteria. You should build links that bring credibility and improve your conversion rates.

7. Social traction

There is no major direct impact of Social media activity on ranking, but they are an important and powerful source for SEO. If your site lacks social media activity, it won’t harm your rankings. There are certain situations where social media helps in a huge way, which successfully impacts on ranking. If your page offers social networks, you can expect it to gain more authority.